Man's Search For Meaning

Man’s Search for Meaning details holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl’s horrifying experiences in Nazi concentration camps, along with his psychological approach of logotherapy, which is also what helped him survive and shows you how you can – and must – find meaning in your life.

Frankl said all concentration camp prisoners went through the several phases after arriving at the camp. This one is what made him and some of his surviving peers different from those, who perished, and it’s quite paradoxical.

In order to survive, you had to be okay with dying any moment.

This sort of indifference to death, the perspective of merely existing, not living, allowed prisoners to shield their minds from the terrors around them and do what was necessary to survive.

All of the things we take for granted today were severely limited in the concentration camps: food, clothing, sleep, rest. By surrendering to the present and not spending one second thinking of the future, prisoners summoned the apathy they needed to, for example, grab a vital pair of shoes from a dead body or hide in a pile of manure to avoid being led to the gas chambers.

Sometimes, the only way to survive is to surrender to dying.

If you ask any great chess player what the best move in chess is, they’ll just stare at you with a puzzled face. There is no such thing. There is, however, a best move in any particular constellation of pieces on the board. Of course there’s a best move in any game situation, but no general move beats all others.

The meaning of your life is the same way.

There’s no general meaning of life and not even one, singular meaning of your own life. Your life’s meaning is not only unique to you, it also depends on your decisions and situations.

This is what logotherapy claims and it flips the common misconception that you have to find your life’s meaning first, before you’re able to live your best life, upside down.

Instead, how you act, and how much responsibility you bring to the decisions you make determines how big your sense of meaning in life is.

For example, Frankl found meaning when stumbling through the night, barefoot, across icy rocks and through big puddles, forced to work by the Nazi guards, simply by thinking of his wife, imagining her face up in the clouds and finding bliss in this moment of love.

Another thing logotherapy does is enable people by focusing on their internal state of mind, instead of external factors, thus giving them a sense of control over their own life. For example, if you’re afraid of sometimes stuttering in front of your friends,…